Timeline: How Messaging Has Grown In The Computer Age

In 1961, a group of computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology created a system where multiple people could share computer resources at once. At the time, access to computers was extremely limited. The notion was to share a scarce resource and store shared files.

Along the way, though, the MIT team more or less accidentally created a way for users to leave messages for each other.

Called the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), the system was primarily used to write and debug code, but it would spread across Boston-area colleges as a messaging system for close to the next decade.

We’ve always turned new technologies into communication tools. Dial-up bulletin board systems, or BBSes, were popular in the 1980s, giving way to the interactive chatrooms of Prodigy, AOL, and other online services in the ’90s.

Text messaging untethered our communications. And with the rise of the smartphone, messaging apps usurped traditional texting as a way to chat with friends.

What’s important to remember is that scrappy upstarts like WhatsApp and Snapchat didn’t come out of nowhere. Their forebears, like AIM and BlackBerry Messenger, laid the groundwork for their explosive popularity by training us to send short electronic messages to each other.

Messaging is now the hottest commodity in technology as companies contend to be the service that controls how you communicate, leading to the fierce messaging wars taking place in 2014.

But how did we get here? We’ve noted some of the biggest points in the mobile messaging saga that’s driven apps to fetch massive price tags, and, now that smartphones are more popular than feature phones worldwide, the app economy will only grow from here.

Lead image by Jim Pennucci; timeline illustration by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite

Related Posts

Facebook isn’t accepting advertisements that promote Google Plus on its social network, as one self-described “Internet Geek” recently found out. After having placed an ad that informed Facebook visitors to add him on Google Plus, Michael Lee Johnson reported that Facebook shut down all his advertising campaigns, and banned him from using the…

Facebook seems to be testing a new feature that could give it more granular data of people’s profiles and strengthen bonds within its social graph. Facebook has started showing users a “needs review” notification for information that others add in your profile. For instance, say you want to add a colleague from a past or current job, the person…

Twitter rolled out a limited beta of its new lists feature to a larger number of users late last night. With these new lists, Twitter users can now organize their friends into groups. By default, these lists are private, but one of the most interesting aspects of this new feature is that users can also make their lists public – something many…

Nearby Friends is a new Facebook application which taps into the recently launched Facebook Places check-in service to locate all your Facebook friends plotted on a Google Maps interface. The app, a simple tool that places Facebook profile photos as a pin on the map, doesn’t limit itself to where your friends are right now, it actually displays…